Novel biomarkers for melanoma immunotherapy

Abstract

Traditionally, metastatic melanoma had a dismal prognosis, but the recent advent of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) has extended survival from months to years for some patients. There is an urgent need to identify prognostic and predictive biomarkers for melanoma patients treated with ICI, given that only a minority of patients respond, coupled with the potential treatment related toxicities. This thesis aimed to investigate clinical factors, functional PET imaging and tumour immune profiling as candidate biomarkers for ICI in patients with melanoma. Firstly, Chapter 3 focused on baseline performance status as a biomarker for outcome following anti-PD-1. The hypothesis was that unli..